The BEST Facebook Ads Format (Based On Data)

Key Takeaways

I've got some new Facebook ad format data that shows which Facebook and Instagram ad format produces the best results and there are a couple of things I want to say about this data right now firstly I was surprised by this data and I spent more than $100 million on Facebook ads and secondly the data on the best Facebook ad format has changed a lot since I last looked into this so let's start by talking about where I got this data from and this data actually comes from my audience I have the largest YouTube channel exclusively dedicated to Facebook and Instagram ads and buy long ways it's a really good place to gather information and data from other Facebook advertisers I also have the largest Facebook group exclusively dedicated to Facebook and Instagram advertising world with more than a quarter of a million people on it so I get a lot of great information and data from my audience at this point and I regularly poll my audience on YouTube I somewhat recently asked them which was their best performing Facebook ad format and let me show you the results okay so we got just under 3,000 votes a pretty good um sample size there and I gave four options like a video image Carousel or other and you can see here that video is by far in way the ad format that is most likely to perform best for people in my audience that responded to this poll with 60% of people saying that video was the best performer image came in at 27% Carousel at 9% and then other at 4% now one of the things that's really interesting about this and the data and the responses I got there is that I asked that same question on my audience a couple of years ago and look how it differs so if I jump to a very similar poll that I ran literally two years ago but we can see that video instead of being 60% of the time that being the best performing ad format um for the people that responded it was 44% when I did this two years ago um single image was 38% at the time that's now dropped to 27% Carousel has dropped a bit from 14 to 9% and other has remained at um 4% so you can see that during that two year time span we've seen a really significant shift away from Carousel away from single image towards video and that might not surprise um you watching this perhaps you see similar data in your own ad account you know other advertisers you think yeah that that sounds about right but I did find that um surprising that we've seen that large a shift in that shorter time period And when we compare this data from the uh from the more recent poll to our own internal data it is very very SAR so where we've got video 60% to the time being the best ad format image 27 Carousel 9 other four that is very close to what we see internally and we have more than 400 ad accounts as part of our business manager where we're managing campaigns at this point so from that alone we get a lot of data that we can use to draw conclusions help make decisions improve results and by the way if you would like to be one of those 400 um ad accounts withs manager and have us create manage and optimize your ad campaigns there is a link in the video description below you can click on that come through to a page on our website site book in a free no obligation call to find out more so if that sounds interesting go ahead and do that and hopefully we get a chance to work together now the really interesting thing about this data being so close to our own internal data I mean we're one or two percentage points I think we're 58% on video as opposed to 60% slightly more on image otherwise we're basically the same is that I really didn't expect that because videos are much harder to create and as a fully fledged agency we have video editors and we can put together you know really good quality stuff we do this this all the time but I know a lot of people in my audience lot of that responded to this yes there are large companies with um like the resources to be able to produce high quality video um but a lot of them are going to be Freelancers they're going to be solo entrepreneurs with the whole business to manage I didn't expect them to be able to produce to to be this video heavy I thought they would be more leaning on images because they're much easier to create and a poor quality video is not likely to perform as well as a high quality image a high quality video May well perform better than a than a high quality image but do you know what I mean like if you're going to do video ads they need to be good otherwise um they're not really going to work so what that shows me is that Facebook and Instagram advertisers have now caught up to the fact that video is a fantastic ad format could well be the best performing ad format for most businesses is the best performing ad format at this point and they' decided that even though it is difficult to create they've probably heard me talking about it for so long that it may well be worth doing investing time resources um getting external help potentially to produce um high quality video ads so I was surprised to see how much it shifts that quickly I was surprised to see that our own internal data matches up with this um almost exactly and it shows that people are doing the hard work that is required within the Facebook ad ST which is which is fantastic and um and yeah and there's some other interesting things that we can think about when it comes to to taking a look at this Facebook ads format data so firstly video at 60% you might think right it's all just video I've just talked there about how good video is we should only be running video ad format and that's not true there are still in this case 40% of businesses and even with our own internal data where we can produce high quality video and do so regularly like we have that skill set even in that scenario we're still 40ish per of the time not seeing the best results um through video don't just assume it's all video don't use any of the other AD formats you absolutely want to test the other AD formats because they may well perform better for your specific business and this is really important because within this poll there's going to be lots of different businesses going to be e-commerce businesses and service businesses and software businesses and coaches and consultants and all sorts we have to sort of differentiate when should we be using what ad format what produces better results for certain types of businesses and there's a general rule of thumb that I like to use here and that's that the complexity of the ad format should match the size of the ask so if you're asking someone who sees your ad to do something really simple like buy an inexpensive product like an impulse purchase often image is going to be be the best ad format because with an image you can very quickly and easily convey all the information you need to convey get one of these doesn't it look good here's a discount here's a special sale we're running click here go buy it like it's not difficult for people to do the ask is very small so we want a simple ad format in that scenario if you created uh a complex video that was 3 minutes long people would not watch it they would never make it to the end they would never make it to the call to action and you'd miss out on so many people that were just willing to click through and purchase however if the ask is something much more signal ific let's say for example we're advertising our done for you Facebook and Instagram ad Services a really big ask we know that that's often for the clients to work with us the success of their Facebook and inst campaigns is going to be one of the most important determining factors in whether or not their business succeeds whether or not their business grow so it's a huge decision for them to decide yeah we trust Ben and his team with our stuff we think they're going to do a good job and get better results than than what we can so our ads if you see see a lot of my advertising they are more complex longer video videos because we have to do a lot more convincing in our advertising we have to put in proof and testimonials and talk about the upside and talk about how much easier their life's going to be and and basically we have to sell more if we just Tred to use a simple image maybe we could get away with that with retargeting warm audiences a little bit but to cold audiences no chance because there's just not enough convincing happening there so yes you are still going to lose people as they go through that video a longer video just like if you're selling the the simple impulse purchased product but the people that you lose were unlikely to be interested in such a big askk anyway and you need the extra time to be able to sell people on the big askk you still want to test but that's a good general rule of thurm is to um use match the complexity of the ad format with the size of the ask another thing that you might have thought going through this particularly comparing the data from two years ago versus now is like okay the trend is towards video it's only ever going you know 2 years time it's going to be 80% video and 2 years after that it's going to be 100% video I really don't think that's going to be the case I think that what we're seeing now at 60% video mixture of the others is probably what we're likely to stick to for a number of years I don't think it's going to continue being more video heavy than that mainly for what I because of what I just described where I said look video performs really well more than half the time for a lot of businesses but there are absolutely times when image is going to outperform where Carousel is going to outperform where it's just really simple impulse project or um like a leave magnet so for example my webinar ads I run ads to a webinar they are image ads for the most part we have some carousels in there as well but I don't think we have any video ads live at the moment we've experimented with it I don't think we have any video I think their image and their Carousel you can go to The Meta ads library and check this out and take a look and that's because it's a simple ask right it's a free webinar all you got to do is sign up for it and watch it it's educating people about Facebook ad strategy so within my business we're seeing differences depending on the different offers that we're advertising and I I think that Dynamic is likely to continue because if you're simple ask you don't want to make people sit through a long form complex ad format alongside working out which Facebook ad formats work best for you and your competitors it's really valuable to know how your competitor's overall digital marketing is performing and which strategies they are using with similar web the sponsor of today's video you can do exactly that quickly and easily let me show you how one of my favorite similar web features works so I'm here in my similar web account I've just come into the website analysis section and here you can search for your competitors and find out some really great information so I'm going to use my own website as an example but obviously you could do this uh for a competitor so I'm just going to put in Heath media. co.uk which is my own website you can see I've search for it previously now once I enter in my website here you can see all sorts of really interesting information just imagine this is a competitor right so we got total visits that's helpful to know device distribution you can see my website is more desktop heavy lots of great engagement metrics how changes over time where people are coming from so unsurprisingly for us with us UK heavy India is at the top of the list as well not surprising and then this is my favorite part the marketing channel section so you can see that we get a lot of our traffic from organic search and social neither of those should be very surprising because I produce a lot of content on social channels like this video watching right now we also do a lot of advertising via Facebook and Instagram ads but then there's also a significant amount of organic search because at this point my business has quite a lot of brand value people know who we are they're searching for the agency name and they're searching um for my name and of course you can dig into any one of these um even further a really really useful tool it's kind of like being able to look at the inside of your competitor's Google analytics dashboard right now you can get a 7-Day free trial of similar web using the link in the video description below now one of the key takeaways that I want you to have from this video is that testing is really important yes by the looks of things video is likely to be your best ad format your best performing ad format for your business but you absolutely want to test the other options because if you don't and it turns out that one of the other AD formats was the better option for your business business then you're missing out big time so absolutely make sure you test and if you haven't tested video ads you aren't using video ads by the looks of things it's quite clear you should be you should at least be experimenting with them now if you decide to do that what you need to know is that the first 3 seconds the hook of your video ads is by far the most important part you should spend a lot more time on that than you should on any other 3 second section and within the video itself I've created a whole video that shows you how to create video hooks for your Facebook and Instagram video ads that can really help improve the performance of those ads you can go ahead and watch it here and I strongly recommend you go through it if you're running video ads and want to improve them or thinking about running video ads like I said those first few seconds are the most important part that's going to convince people either to watch the rest of the video ad or not and if they don't watch the rest of video ads then they're certainly not going to find out all about your products and services how fantastic they are they're far less likely to click and they are far less likely to convert really is that important so go ahead and check it out